 Every family has a legend or two: the stowaway who escaped certain death, the iron-jawed mamma who led the family through unbearable hardship, the guy with the secret second family. Heroic family lore can be true, of course it can. Enter the genealogy nerd. Perhaps a bit of a bore (to be fair, all enthusiasts can be), the person prepared to do the research, to blaze a paper trail, to test DNA for actual proof--that person has the potential to become a clan's most magnificent buzzkill. But boy-howdy does the hobby work as a way to power through a sub-optimal afternoon. On a recent snowy Sunday, I was down by migraine and turned, as one will, to self-soothing activities. My tree on Ancestry.com, to be exact. The site compiles gigabyte after gigabyte of documentation, integrates DNA testing if you choose, and provides an infinity of rabbit-holes to explore. Thanks to resources of Ancestry, sadly, the Flathead grandmother to my mom's family, and the Cherokee grandmother in Jeff's family have both turned out to be a bit of tall talismans: Romantic idealism without neither paper trail nor genetic confirmation. Believe me I know: way to kill a buzz, Amy. Jeesh.  Which leads me to that other legend in my family: witchcraft. My sister remembers hearing from our grandmother—the one who often, spookily, spoke aloud the other half of the thought someone else was thinking, and whose psychic hunches had an unsettling way of coming true—that we had an ancestor burned at the stake in Salem.  Whether they burned practitioners of some craft or not, that's some pretty steep ancestor power. Anyway: Sunday, there I was, chipping away at the Riggs line: my dad's mom's dad's people, who were fruitful and did multiply ever since setting foot in the New World in the 1630's. The family includes kind of a lot of folks keeping the family name of "Carrington" going on as middle names. Proudly. Call it a lingering 1980's big-shouldered television jones, but the name makes me chuckle every time I read it. It's like Thurston Howell III announcing through teeth clenched around a cigarette holder: "Lovey! Carrington has arrived!" So I side-quested Carringtons. One of the Riggses married a Carrington; pulling on that thread brought me up into the high boughs of the family tree: Peter Carrington, a physician in New Haven in the early 1700s. My fifth great grandfather, this Dr. Peter had a big family with at least three physician sons (John, Lemuel, and Riverius Carrington), but his grampa John? John Carrington (1602-1651), the one who came to the New World in 1630? He has the rare distinction of being hanged for a witch in Wethersfield, Connecticut Colony. He and his (likely second) wife Joann were hanged for witchcraft.  Oh how I wish there were more details. Like who accused the Carringtons? What in the world were "works above the course of nature"? Was "not having the fear of God before their eyes" crime enough to be put to death? It took two days to convict them. Did they confess? Were they tortured? They left behind an 10-year-old son John and Rebecca, a babe in arms, both of whom lived to carry on the Carrington name. Can you imagine the stigma? The trauma? Though both kids moved away from Wethersfield, the history of their family followed them. The New Haven town clerk, Matthew Grant, kept a diary and thanks to him and the blessed souls at the Connecticut State Archives, we know the Carringtons were not burned or "pressed," but executed by hanging.  The bottom line reads: Mar 10 50 Carrington and his wife were hanged. A bald, heartbreaking fact. Why does it say "50"? Because, oddly enough, the change to the Gregorian calendar. Long story short, the Julian calendar said each year was 365.25 days long, which after 1000 years or so, meant the days were nearly two weeks off alignment with the physical year. Most of the European world switched in 1582, but the British and their Colonies switched over in 1752. At the same time, they changed the first of the year from March 1 to January 1. Talk about your Y2K bug! Hence the number of slashed dates (1605/6) in the early Puritan history in New England. But a journal from 375 years ago? If, like me, you are intrigued by the idea of accessing this kind of source material: a personal diary! Hand written! Hidden for hundreds of years! Well. First, quill pens and the use of a long s that looks like an f—! Second, Matthew used these pages mostly, as far as I can tell, to transcribe sermons and religious poetry. At first look, I thought he was using some sort of code (it was not code. It was Biblical citation. Remember that the King James Bible had just dropped in 1611). So, third: it might look like a grimoire, or a collection of gossip and insight, but no, his diary concerns itself with thinking and talking about Christian godliness. A LOT. I am holding back on the idea of the actual practice of Christian godliness, even thought Buzzkill is my middle name.  Nevertheless, back to the family lore. My grandmother's story had a bitter grain of truth: My 8th great-grandfather, a carpenter in Wethersfield, CT, was hanged as a witch. Connecticut archives:
https://ctdigitalarchive.org/node/3901238 A note from one of Rebecca Carrington's descendants to the Representatives of the State of Connecticut asking for a pardon for John and Joann Carrington https://www.cga.ct.gov/2023/juddata/TMY/2023HJ-00034-R000301-Vogel-Scibilia,%20Suzanne-Supports-TMY.PDF An essay about the Connecticut pardons: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/senators-absolve-accused-witches-with-one-exception/ A horrifying account of the practice of "pressing" which is how 81-year-old Giles Corey of Salem met his death: https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/10/the-crushing-death-of-giles-corey-of-salem-1692/ John Carrington's Find-a-Grave notation. Ironic really: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/181727621/john-carrington
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 Does the color blue taste like dirty laundry? Like SweetTarts? Like beef jerky? Like mud? Synesthesia is a brain condition that creates just this sort of sensory crossover. Some synthesthetes “smell” colors or “taste” words. For these people, sounds can be cold or damp or spiked, and scents may have distinct textures. It's a condition that runs in families, and might affect as many as one in every two dozen people. The crossover is not universal (not everyone tastes green as mint, but there is some overlap from person to person...) Oh -- and the condition sometimes visits the brain with help from traumatic brain injury, seizure disorder, psychedelic drugs.  Vladimir Nabokov, famously, had one of the most common forms of this condition called grapheme-synthesthesia or “color reading.” Both he and his wife Vera associated colors with various letters. In his memoir, Speak Memory, he writes that the “V” of his own name is “quartz pink” and the number 5 is red. Regardless the typographical convention, the Arabic numeral 5 was red to him.
Telling Stories I was born poor to a story-telling family. I was born to an extravagant wealth of untruths. (Q.E.D.) I was born in the ordinary way to normal-enough fam-- that can’t be it. I was not born at all, but hatched. I was not hatched but hacked out of a migraine headache. Or hack-sawed from a barred window. Not hack-sawed -- haver-sacked. Hacky-sacked. Halleluiah. Belay all that. I was born all right. I’ll show you born. There’s evidence in white orthopedic booties, and ill-formed rubber bottle tips, plus that whole hair-shirt with kindergarten and the nuns. I’ve seen the photos: Pete the party pony led by a young man who resembles my father; the series of gradational pastel Easter outfits, one white glove of which cameos on another page with someone who could be me at age seven or five, if I wore a red bathing suit and held a jessed sparrow-hawk on a cotton-gloved hand.  But pictures only suggest a thousand stories. It’s not their job to nail down the tone, firm up the details, calculate the exact twirl to put on the facts. And in my family, it was all playing to the crowd and fighting for the stage, and telling the best story. Well anyway, hardships, scholarships, sailing ships. I ended up in Manhattan, walking to save subway fare. And it was snowing uphill both ways. But there was Susan Sontag and her son David Rieff striding off to lunch and Scott Turow presuming Innocent at Farrar Straus Giroux. And that Tom Wolfe, wraithing around in a white suit trying to finish Bonfire, looking all “what can ail thee knight at arms, alone and paley loitering”. Time flapped on. Like it does. What with the weird mono, and the no money, and the student loans and all, the whole New York City thing didn’t work out as I had hoped. So it came to pass that I packed my worldly goods into a rusted white Ford Fiesta and drove to St. Pete Beach, Florida to connect with my reconstructed, unconnected, soi-dis family. Most notably, to take my turn looking after my grandmother Mimi as she shuffled off this mortal coil. The last of the family money and an excellent shopper, Mimi had Parkinson’s and a bright, colorless head of hair. She tended to tip, tilt, list, lilt, like one of those Weebles who wobble but won't fall down. She lunched at the yacht club with three college chums: sixty-plus years of chat, bridge, powdered cheeks, and someone else driving. She liked to file her fingernails and re-apply perfume while riding shotgun in the car. Downshifting my Fiesta on the corner, avoiding that big gold Caddy with its turn-indicator flashing pointlessly for an entire presidential era and -- tsst! I got it. A cloud of condensed scent dark as espresso, a spritz of pre-Socratic Shalimar, right in the eye. Seems like a piss-poor silly way to go, I was thinking while making the dramatic steering correction across traffic and elbowing Mimi back upright, and then, as we emerged unscathed: but it might make an okay story. Of course, not as funny as the story of cousin K leaving that girl, making a hobo sack of his entire wardrobe from a flowery sheet and then santa-clausing it over his shoulder, stopping at the car dealership for his paycheck on his way out of town, wearing just long-johns and boots under his coat, pointing explanation for his boss at the mattress tied inadequately to the roof of the car. Not nearly as fun as the story of Dad and the uncles crashing my sister’s Halloween party, rattling chains down the chimney, appearing up-lit and remarkably ghoulish at the windows, resulting in an incident involving one of the grade-school party-goers, piddle, and a rather nice Turkish rug. Not in the same realm of the story as the night of the bat invasion, or the time Cousin D won the coin-toss to light the black-powder-laden model schooner. It’s not sweet, like the one about Nana being kidnapped and rescued as a toddler in Albany, or the time Aunt P shouted from the porch, “All right, you little bastards, it’s lunchtime,” because her father suggested that the word “guys” was vulgar. Maybe not even my own story, come right to it. But it might do for now. There, I’m connected.  |
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